Mobile App Design: Tricks of the Trade

It's an unsung form of creativity in the smartphone age: the thoughtful design of our mobile apps. What follow are lessons from three different UX designers about how to master mobile.

TIPS ON MOBILE GAME DESIGN FROM ANDERS HEJDENBERG

Designer 1337 & Senri Gothenburg, Sweden

Elsa Jenna

Make Chunks

A game's vivid background art can be a serious memory hog. Hejdenberg says the key is to compress all of the art and music onto the phone's hard drive, then decompress small chunks into memory as a player moves forward.

Get Fuzzy

Mobile gamers can notice only so much visual detail, so designers are always on the lookout for graphics that can be compressed without affecting the overall experience. In his whimsical iPhone hit Leo's Fortune, for example, Hejdenberg made the game run faster by optimizing some of the fog effects.

EBOOK DESIGN TIPS FROM ROB SIDERS

Designer 52 Novels Sylvania, Ohio

Elsa Jenna

Sweat the Small Stuff

When an ebook gets read on a phone as opposed to a Kindle or tablet, it's the little things that can look askew, like the styling of the first letters of new chapters. “If you talk to ebook designers,” Siders says, “the one thing they'll all say is ‘Why can't Amazon get drop caps right?’” Designers often have to adjust drop-cap sizes by fractions of a percent and retest them before they render correctly on phone screens.

Streamline the Zaniness

Inventive literary devices are always a challenge to replicate when shifting from the physical page to a 4.7-inch screen. “In one book I did last year, about a third took place between two characters in text messages and Skype chats,” Siders says. Those exchanges can be preserved, but they must be depicted in a straightforward way, without relying on funky fonts or other jarring visual devices that clutter tiny screens.

ART APP DESIGN TIPS FROM ANDREW KERN

Creator, ASKetch Seattle, Washington

Elsa Jenna

Nix the Delays

Pen and paper don't make you wait, and your drawing app shouldn't either. “You don't want a splash screen,” Kern says. “You want it to load as fast as possible.”

Identify Bottlenecks

As a sketch grows more complex the way the app responds to an artist's touch shouldn't change. When testing ASKetch, Kern noticed that the app slowed over time because it was buffering the entire working image. The finished app, by contrast, transfers only the incremental changes from buffer to screen.

Mimic Real Life

Artists like it when their digital instruments work like their real-world ones—even if that isn't necessarily the most efficient approach. Kern made ASKetch's eraser behave like a rubber one: Instead of deleting markings with a single swipe, it gradually lightens the image in response to a vigorous back-and-forth motion.

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